W.W.&F. Discussion Forum

On May 28, Ed Lecuyer informed me that the forum was showing an error of some kind, looked like the forum database software had crashed.

I was unable to recover us from that state. I tried installing a new version of the forum, but ran into bigger trouble (namely, a blank slate!).

I had our host restore the website to their full backup from Friday night/Saturday morning midnight. The forum is back in operation, minus any posts from Saturday and Sunday. I do not plan to try to recover them.

So thankful for the recovery!!! Bet it was pretty scary for you guys...

Another lesson in why it's so important to back up your own systems EVERY day. Including your home computer. If you don't have a backup plan, run -- don't walk -- to get either a backup drive and software (such as Acronis) or a backup cloud solution.

First of a HUGE thank you to James for getting the forum restored. This issue quickly dwarfed my IT/web/database experience and James stepped up to the plate to get it fixed - on his day off! Also, I was away from my PC for most of this outage, so I could only be of limited help - so James is the real hero.

I wonder if this is related to the RyPN crash. They are still down as of 8:30 pm Monday with no explanation I have been able to find.

No. We are not connected to RYPN in any way and it appears that their forum is functional in some capacity (I did see it go live briefly, now it is dead again.) Although it is fun to speculate that some North Korean hacker really dislikes US heritage railroading...

The real thanks go to the service personnel at our website host site, TotalChoice Hosting (http://totalchoicehosting.com/ (http://totalchoicehosting.com/). All I did was write a ticket, they did all the work. Of course getting to that point took a while of messages back and forth between Ed and I. It was Ed's idea to restore the website from back up.